Pages

lundi 14 mars 2011

Log Cabin Under Snow / Une cabane sous la neige

Log Cabin Under Snow

I took this photograph in the Saguenay region near Saint-Ambroise. This is a very classic composition. It is thus very important to come up with an image as perfect as possible.

Of course it would have been a mistake to centre the cabin. Placing it in the lower left corner actually draws attention to it... a strange result of composition. I then corrected the snow colour, erase all small defects and did all my usual hocus-pocus in order to get an image as decent as possible.

Remember this, it's almost always true: The simpler the shot, the more you will have to work in order to get a very good image.

Roger, I would have commented on this on the blog, but I though that it would be too hard to explain, especially to those who wouldn't understand anyway. That I though that the middle ground trees/bushes were just maybe a little over sharp... DON"T BEAT ME UP!

SO I did a layer mask with a 1Pix Gaussian Blur starting at the mid ground line and upward. I then made that layer a "HIde" and using the brush tool painted uniformly at 10% opacity that slightly blurred layer back onto your image. Funny thing is unless you have them side by side you really can't see the difference.

@James: Well well well, amigo, a honest to God critique! Why should I be offended by such a critique, I ask you? Whether you're right or not is another matter...

I truly think that those who have the theoretical and artistic knowledge to critique, without taking into account their personal preferences, should do so.

And I indeed tell you all: I do welcome critiques if you have the time. If you only want to leave a short comment, that's fine too!

James, my friend, you happen to be right and I downgrade this image from Acceptable to Sub par. Thanks for the work you did on the image to illustrate your point BTW.

This image is badly oversharpened... shame on me. I went back to the original hi res image and it seems to be (almost) OK. The problem is, I reduced the image using the Bicubic Sharper algorithm instead of the Bicubic Smoother algorithm. As the image was already slightly oversharpened, it gave that awful result.

I recreated the image using the more appropriate algorithm and the results are much better, as you can see here.

Roger,You are indeed correct this is a Much better final product than the original post. It is just a damn good piece of Photography, from all standpoints now. Balance, color, frame, and all the other BUZZ words used, it fits now.

As far a critiques go on this blog, It would seem that most here do not have a sound or even basic understanding of the image post processing, er process, and this lack makes it "hard?" for those lacking in the fundamentals of this process to see where an image may be improved. Because EVERY image can be made better (easier to do if shot in RAW of course), if not, well then that is a different story.

I think most people believe that a good photographer, for instance, one that has had shots in "National Geographic", just dumps them into their computer, picks the best ones, then sends them off. This is NOT how it goes! They sit for HOURS, AND DAYS working on, and picking through, each image looking for the one that they can SAVE, and "post process" well enough to get it into that above mentioned magazine. Those images in that magazine represent many MANY hours of work at the computer in post processing. PERIOD. The camera was only the FIRST step.

The ease with which anyone can buy and use an 8+ mega-pixel camera makes it hard to critique the work that they do without causing offense. Showing them that the camera is NOT the end of the process, but just the beginning, is the hard part. Something as touchy as sharpening and the choice of algorithm used to do the sharpening, is beyond most weekend photographers. Why? Because most people do their photography with a $500- $1,000 camera and then have NO software to do any post processing with.

Again WHY? Answer: Photoshop is not cheap, and sorry for any of you who are using "Aperture" it's just not there yet. IMHO. Not only is Photoshop not cheap, but the learning curve for this pice of software is horrendous, it literally take YEARS to learn the ins and outs, and all the tricks that you can do with it, and then they CHANGE it! It is a long ongoing process with Photoshop. But a necessary one, if you are not going to turn out just mediocre, average imagery.

I apologize if this has offended anyone, it was not intended. I myself had a website up featuring my digital imagery as far back as 2004. It is down now for many reasons, mostly because the images are no longer of acceptable quality to me. What was good once is not so good now. For many reasons I lost some very interesting images, some with great potential, just because the technology was not there yet and I could not afford the cost of a professional camera at that time. We move forward, that is what we do, I do, you do. Learn. Think. Improve.Jim

James,Did you see BTW why the image is still only acceptable instead of great? There is still work to do on it, it will take an hour or two I think: Look at all the little bright spots in the snow! Those spots were unobtrusive at the beginning, but Unsharp Mask put them much in evidence. This is no way of sharpening today as there are new algorithms, way better than that.

You could for example use Photoshop's Smart Sharpen with the Lens Blur algorithm. And if the results are not as good as you want, you then use the advanced mode of that same command... and then you're in business!

It is very possible that I go back to photo.net in order to use the high level of critique you can get there.

I see the bright spots to which you refer, however they are not offensive to my eye. On the contrary I would expect to see these on a bright day such as the one this image was taken on. My critique still stands, I think this is a fine image.Jim